Principal Juror – Stephen Bennett, Phillips Curator, The Phillips Collection

New American Paintings celebrates the medium and demonstrates that painting is alive and well in the United States at a time when photography and media art seem to receive more press and recognition. The regional surveys provided by New American Paintings confirm that painting still has vitality and meaning for a contemporary audience, and that it flourishes everywhere, not just in so-called art capitals. Artists should take heart. This is an exciting time for painting because anything goes, from the visceral to the cerebral, which has not always been the case. So-called art capitals are somewhat passé, because the main marketplace seems to be the moveable art fair, which makes buying art less daunting to a much wider public. Today, artists have more stylistic liberty than ever. They are free to create paintings that express their own vision, rather than feeling bound to a particular form or style—representational, abstract or somewhere in between.  It is no surprise to find that nonobjective styles are well represented in the Mid-Atlantic region. Hale Allen, Neil R. Anderson and Kevin Kepple are exponents of lyrical lines in the creation of loopily interesting works of art. June Wilson focuses on shapes in Terrapin Terrapin, starting with a five-sided canvas. The perfection of three ovals is energized by the dynamism of the dramatic brush stroke and splat across the canvas. Fran Shalom brings tension to her amoeba-like shapes, which literally crowd each other in the pictorial plane. Alex Paik hugs the boundary between objective and nonobjective art in his painting Mike Tyson’s Punch Out (TKO), where shapes occupy an implied architectural space.  The idea of using dots goes back to late-nineteenth century pointillism and continues to intrigue artists today. Amy Lin uses a string of dots, each of which is energized by an interior dot, producing a web of rhythmic lines in her lyrical work. Henry Bermudez, Daniel Finch, Timmy Graham and Fiona Ross use pointillist marks as building blocks to produce powerful works of art. In When the Light Appears, Carolyn Case does not work exclusively with the dot, but uses a teardrop shape on a solid tree trunk to give the illusion of snow falling in the landscape.  Since a painting is the outcome of an artist’s attempt to translate three-dimensional form to a two-dimensional plane, it is often interesting to see the clues that artists leave about their process and their inspiration. Louis Poole shows us the perspective lines for his architectural paintings, which add a dynamic quality to an otherwise staid architectural drawing. In drawing her figures, Alyssa Dennis does not complete the form, giving the work a sense of movement. Courtney Jordan and Sharka Hyland use perspective to create canvases with a three-dimensional quality; yet the objects in their pictures, although usually recognizable, don’t add up to anything we know other than a whiff of science fiction. Stephen Cope is a different case. His colorful, spheres, like giant billiard balls, hurtle through imaginary skies. But they are not planets; they are solid forms in space, in a demonstration of pure painting.Representational painting, much of it influenced by photography and film, is probably the most practiced style of painting today. Tina Newberry’s L’il Shootout (Clint + Barney) includes a complex recession in the illusionistic space, as well as layers of meaning:  the two self-portraits, coupled with the Andy Griffith Show rerun on the television and the shadow of Clint Eastwood in the background, suggest a concern with the issue of reality and representation. A youthful spirit is seen in Robert Sparrow Jones’s work, where the palette and lines give the work a joyful energy. J. Pocklington also captures youthful joie de vivre in Ladies Love Lars, where theatrical drama is created by the bird’s-eye perspective and the glowing halos around the central figures. Drama and gore take center stage in the photorealist painting Give Blood by Kimberly Frost, showing blood overflowing from cupped hands. Dan Simon’s surreal landscape, The River 2, is an endless sea of tires that serve to camouflage alligators in the foreground. Smilingly, they crawl around like sinister kids on a playground. Executed in colored pencil, it is a tour de force of drawing. With slightly blurred form and black and white palette, Joseph Hu creates a dreamlike quality in Rich’s Room––a reference to an out-of-focus photograph.  Within the representational category, some artists reference book illustration. Rachel Bone and Sarah Owens Mattes work this vein, in a faux naïf way, using strong feminine symbols in their work. Susan Jamison uses the female form, too, but her bookish references are to anatomical texts, Audubon illustrations and Persian miniatures, as well as classical portraiture.   

In some ways, Renée Stout straddles both nonobjective and representational painting. Her multilayered collages contain passages of abstract surface interest, photorealist painting, and faux naïf content that blends biography and fiction. An artist like Stout shows that artists are completely free to follow their personal vision rather than the “isms” of the day.